@mightymoe I'm more curious than anything else. Clearly public lands landlocked by private property are inaccessible to the public by means of stepping over the corner or 'corner hopping' as they refer to it as it's violating the airspace of private property. Would this include accessing to the same public lands via helicopter or hot air balloon? Does that public land become a defacto private reserve of the adjoining private property owners? No dog in the fight other than being a citizen and therefor a member of the public.
People do that all the time. So no as far as I understand. There is plenty of "Federal" lands to hunt and?ÿ accessible from public access in the area of the hopping. This was done by out-of-state hunters to bring on this legal action, it was moved to federal court erroneously in my humble opinion. The whole thing was a set-up.?ÿ
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This issue has been a long time coming.?ÿ There's an extended interview with the hunters at Meateater Podcast.?ÿ They came off as combative to me but not sophisticated enough to be able to predict how far the landowner would take it and not wealthy enough to pick this big of a fight. The landowner is the one who's about to mess everything up for folks with defacto exclusive rights to public lands. Large land holders should encourage him ($$$) to drop the lawsuit.
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defacto exclusive rights to public lands
I would state that as defacto access control over public land they have no more right to than any other citizen.
@williwaw See this WSJ article for access through airspace.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hunting-land-access-dispute-wyoming-11668094125
This makes me think of Joe Pickett in real life. :-)?ÿ
I wonder if things would have turned out differently if the hunters were all surveyors? They could claim they were on a recon mission prior to sending crews. ?????ÿ
That's a very nice presentation of the issues, thanks for posting it!
In Northern Arizona the Federal Government gifted dozens, if not hundreds of checkerboarded sections to a Native American tribe with no mention of access rights. Most of the alternate sections within these sections are owned by the State, and now have no right of access either. Both parties are now landlocked from most of the land...
This entire subject is fascinating to me because it isn't something that comes up around here.
I would think since the land which didn??t belong to the government was ??patented? for free or very cheap to robber barons there is at least an implied easement right of access, at least in the case of natural justice. It wouldn??t necessarily go that way in our corporate owned court system, however.
Land Title is really just a coupon enforceable in the court system of the government which created the title. No one owns land, they only own a right to enforce their exclusive use in court and to use the law enforcement arm of the government to eject trespassers.
Clearly the PLSS considered this and created section line easements.?ÿ Unfortunately, that plan was not always carried out, and sometimes done away with at State or local level.?ÿ An example from North Dakota:
https://www.ag.ndsu.edu/aglawandmanagement/appliedaglaw/reference/sectionlines
Also a private condemnation statute in many States including Wyoming.
This is an interesting difference between the various States.?ÿ Very interesting.?ÿ This is another example of why those who work in multiple States need to learn these differences.